Seraphim (24 page)

Their merriment had been replaced with black, beady eyes, voracious in their intensity.

George finally looked at Gamble, who was now in possession of Melanie Sand’s flute case.

“How about a little dinner music?” Gamble said as he unfastened the silver clasps. “Any requests?”

George couldn’t speak.

“No? Well, I have one. It’s called, ‘Don’t Hurt The Beasties.’ I think you’ll like it.”

The melody was that of “Don’t Eat The Daisies,” the song made famous by Doris Day in the film by the same name. But the music was quickly crushed beneath the charging of wee little feet.

Then another tune erupted, unmelodic and very high-pitched, as hundreds of ravenous, Lilliputian mouths devoured George Altman.

To the core.

15.

They arrived home, wearing their moods like monogrammed sweaters. Juanita was poking and lurking around like a third world bodyguard, Rachel was so infectiously wired that Duncan’s extremities began to tingle when he stood too close to her, and Katherine Bently was just plain chipper. She watched HBO and ate Juanita’s peanut butter cookies.

As for himself, Duncan felt overwhelmed. Goofy-tired.

Weary-eyed, he sat behind his desk, harking back to that infamous day when two bullets dashed through his torso.

It was a funny thing, but not once did anyone from Internal Affairs come slithering around; not when he was in the hospital, and not after his release. Those fellas never gave him so much as a dirty look. And all he could ever remember getting from his cronies were a lot of atta-boys and backslapping. He’d received get-well cards from practically every cop within a hundred-mile radius, and dozens more from police departments around the country. There was even one from Israel.

And having lost his partner on top of it, sympathy had been in abundant supply. Hell, he’d been downright pampered. In fact, on the day of his release, a mariachi band, hired by some of his buddies, played “Hail to the Chief” just outside the doors as they wheeled him out.

Everyone thought he was a hero. He’d almost believed it was true.

But he was sure his partner, Tyler Everton, would disagree. If he were alive.

The day of Tyler’s funeral was the most sobering of Duncan’s life. Though he had still been in intensive care and couldn’t attend, he couldn’t shake the sense that he was a murderer. That feeling had less to do with the funeral and more to do with his decision to stick to Lieutenant Mo White’s somewhat fictionalized version of events.

“No sense in the department losing two good cops” had been Mo’s justification.

Jesus, he was so gigantically screwed up then.

Then? Oh yeah, right
,
he thought.
Now I’m the epicenter of sanity.

The poster child for Prozac.

And a murderer!

If he could do it again, he knew exactly what he would change.

Everything.

Tyler Everton was a good cop. Good meaning beguiled. Tyler had operated under the inveigled impression that people were basically good and well-intentioned. Duncan, on the other hand, had joined the force knowing full well that human beings were very flawed animals. And it wasn’t until he had a few years under his Safari Land basket-weave belt that he understood just how miserably fucked they really were.

Police officers were by no means the exception. On the contrary...

Theirs had not been the partnership upon which cop movies were made, but he and Tyler had nonetheless developed a relationship as trusting as any he had ever had, despite some rather poignant differences of opinion.

You watch my back, I’ll watch yours
: an aphorism Duncan had written on the front of his locker when he was a rookie. It was a reminder to himself, not his fellow officers, that no matter how insignificant or trivial or inconsequential the job, or life, might seem, he would never surrender a colleague’s safety.

He’d known that the cop fraternity was riddled with nothing but cynical, alienated, disenchanted people, sworn to protect and to serve, and to uphold the law through the bloodshot eyes of hypocrisy. When he’d joined the force, his intentions were not to save the world, or even his little corner of it, but to hopefully experience the thrill and excitement that law enforcement promised. Unfortunately, even that illusion was eventually shattered, especially when he was in uniform and cruising the districts. To steal a phrase his captain was fond of: “It’s weeks and weeks of boredom punctuated by seconds of sheer terror.”

That just about summed it up. And, despite the presumed odds, a large percentage of police officers retired from the force without ever having drawn their weapons. Of course, there were always those very few who could never seem to keep them holstered.

Society was briskly going to hell down a dark vertical shaft, but not so much greased by violence as it was apathy, regardless of what TV and its glut of real-cops-in-action programming would have one think. Those shows didn’t often privy the viewing audience to malnourished toddlers living in their own excrement because their mother was too busy whoring to support her drug habit, or the middle-class, upstanding parents who swapped prurient photographs of their six-year-old son with other pedophiles over the Internet.

No, that shit was depressing. People wanted to see fists and cuffs. Hear squealing tires and bleeped-out dialogue. But to the disappointment of all, the vast majority of calls were easy on the knuckles. And the treads.

Hard as hell on the soul.

The list was endless. At least it was for a cop. Because that’s what cops did. They lived in decadence day in and day out.

Shit magnets.

They lived reality.

The badge didn’t differentiate the good people from the bad, he knew. The “Thin Blue Line” that allegedly separated order from anarchy was just an urban legend. Cops didn’t prevent chaos…they controlled it.

It was all just a game; a game where the winners went home in one piece (at least physically), and the losers were left staring down at the shattered remains of what they had for so long thought was truth.

What was truth?

Rachel, after finishing a Joseph Wambaugh novel—they were both avid fans—once said, “There’s no way cops are really like that.”

Duncan had smiled back. “You’re right, babe…they’re worse.”

Cops. What a funny, pathetic, enduring, decadent, heroic breed they were.

Duncan thought that Baxter Slate, a character from Joseph Wambaugh’s
The Choir Boys
, summed it perfectly:
“The very best, most optimistic hope we can cling to is that we’re tick birds who ride the rhino’s back and eat the parasites out of the flesh and keep the beast from disease and hope we’re not parasites too. In the end we suspect it’s all vanity and delusion. Parasites, all of us.”

And the night he was shot, Duncan realized just what kind of parasite he’d become. Or worse, what kind of parasite he’d always been. Ironically, while lying there, bleeding to death, it had finally gelled with him that any contrasts existing between the good guys and bad were, truly, only the dense bricks upon which wallflowers grew.

That night, as Lieutenant Mo White was plugging Duncan’s wounds with his fingers, he’d assured him that he would personally take care of everything, that they’d all come out heroes, smelling like roses.

Oh, he’d acquired a smell all right, but it wasn’t anything like a bouquet of Betty Boops.

As it turned out, Mo himself was a parasite; one of the biggest and most respected bugs to ever create an itch on Boston’s crotch.

Duncan had taken his second bullet for Mo; probably had, in fact, saved Mo’s life.

And the favor was returned in spades.

Mo White: The baddest, blackest cop on the force. Everybody loved Mo. Everybody.

Duncan had suffered a collapsed lung, and lost nearly four pints of blood and a kidney. Why he hadn’t ended up in the morgue was the most asked question by his attending surgeons. They called it a miracle.

Privately, Duncan called it a travesty. He should have died.

Deserved to die.

Like Mo, Duncan had also been well received by his peers and superiors. He’d made a lot of friends in high places over the years, although he never considered it politicking. Not then. It wasn’t until later when he realized just what he’d been doing, and how clandestinely he’d been doing it.

Ergo his decision to remain a detective rather than advance in rank, which he could have done effortlessly.

Actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea
: it is Latin, meaning, “an act does not make a person guilty unless the mind is guilty.”
Mens rea
: Mental culpability. Duncan had not believed himself culpable of trying to gain favors. But after careful review, that had been exactly his intent. And the funniest thing of all, he eventually learned, was that he was not just doing the priming, but that it was he who was also being groomed. Not for anything in particular, just the back-burner variety.

Don’t call us, we’ll call you.

Just look the other way.

And he had. Hell, he’d turned his head so many times he developed a cough.

Law-enforcement was definitely a close-knit family, and ratting on a fellow officer was the civilian equivalent of screwing your best friend’s wife, sending him the pictures, and charging the hotel room to his VISA. It was not tolerated, and met with its own brand of justice.

And because of his loyal adherence to this policy, Duncan had been cared for by his family.

It was all of this and more that eventually led him to radically renounce conventional justice, and to create his own, the crusade reaching its zenith the moment he’d decided to help Patricia Bently in her desperate moment of need. The death of Charles Bently, her husband, had left her in financial ruin, and he’d found a remedy for that.

For so many years, guilt stalked him like a determined beast. Somewhere along the way, though, he’d stopped running, and the monster gained on him.

And now, according to his daughter (and whoever else was in there with her), he was somehow going to help save mankind like some bearded relic from the Old Testament.

Not the rain forests. Not the whales.

The fucking world!

Check, please!

16.

Summoned by the call of banging glass, Eli made it down the stairs just as the courier came though.

“Impatient bastard,” he grumbled.

The creature hopped down from the window, grinned its black, double saw-blade dentition at him, then jerked its wings back from its body like some dwarf exhibitionist, as if to say,
Take a look at this puppy!

Eli scowled. Its
puppy
wasn’t anything to be showing off, but there was even less of Katherine Bently. And that was even more perverted. Blushingly so.

“Son. Of. A. Bitch!” he barked. “Now what?”

On a scoured leg, the creature hobbled to the remnants of what had once been a child’s mattress, now beached upon the basement’s concrete shores, wads of ticking clustering around the carcass like tide foam.

Given its overall tousled appearance, and the blood trail from the window to the mattress, it was more than obvious that the courier had been involved in some kind of fracas.

It squatted on the cotton remains and began preening. This the couriers did constantly, injuries or not, and at a level that made cats look lazy and squalid in comparison. Eli wondered if it had anything to do with their befouled origins; a stink they kept trying to lick away.

If they’d devote as much time and effort to finding the Bently girl,
he thought,
I’d have nine of her by now
.

Glaring at the courier, Eli folded his arms across his chest and said, “My, my, did we fall off our tricycle?”

The creature kept on grooming, but Eli could tell it didn’t much like the innuendo. If it could have effectively raised a middle finger, he was certain it would have thrust one out, wiggling it a few times for emphasis.

“So now what?” Eli said. “Do I send you out again, or replace you with something a bit more competent, say…a blind titmouse?”

The courier hissed at him.

Eli hissed right back. “Kiss my ass! If you don’t bring me Katherine Bently before tomorrow morning, I’ll have your ass on a skewer.” Then something struck him. “Or, is finding her the
easy
part?”

He studied the creature some more, then said, “She’s the one who did this to you, isn’t she? Got your ass kicked by a little girl.”

The courier sheepishly looked away.

“Pussy.”

Then more banging erupted. From behind one of the other windows.

Eli turned, and for a moment stood confused. There was something not quite right with the wall, or perhaps the basement itself.

And then it struck him as nothing else ever had.

The seventh window! It’s here!

He blinked a few times, stared some more, then—very slowly—turned back to the courier.

In a guarded whisper, he said, “Am I hallucinating, or do you see that, too?”

The creature, engrossed with the ceiling as it worked a large knot up and down its slender throat, ignored Eli altogether. Then it hacked up a hairball.

Too shocked to be disgusted, Eli took a deep breath as he turned back around.

The seventh window was still there, another courier behind it, banging again; louder this time. Although he’d been expecting it, deliriously so, he hadn’t realized until just now how emotionally unprepared he was for its arrival.

He finally exhaled, purging his lungs and lingering doubt, surveying the seventh window rather than just ogling it. It appeared to share the same dimensions as the other six—No, Eli thought, that wasn’t exactly true. There was one dimension where it digressed from all the others: Depth. And it’s design of colored glasses was wonderfully grandiose: the image of a man—it was him–stepping into a black, rectangular portal, his right lower leg disappearing into the abyss. And he was especially taken with the way the artist delineated the victory—
the triumph!
—in his smile.